DistroWatch Weekly

A weekly opinion column and a summary of events from the distribution world

DistroWatch Weekly

DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 186, 22 January 2007

Welcome to this year's fourth issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Continuing the post-release coverage of FreeBSD 6.2, this week's issue brings an exclusive interview with Matteo Riondato, a FreeBSD developer and the release engineer of the FreeSBIE live CD. The news section then delivers the usual round-up of miscellaneous news from the distribution world, including a story about the upcoming release of Mandriva "Metisse" edition with a new 3D-enabled desktop environment. Also in the same section, PCLinuxOS launches the first experimental release of the distribution's 2007 version, Fedora Unity announces new, up-to-date re-spins of Fedora Core 6, gNewSense prepares for the release of version 1.1 - now also with KDE, and the T2 project introduces a new minimalist rescue live CD with uClibc. Finally, we are pleased to present BOSS GNU/Linux, a new Indian distribution with the noble goal of providing complete support for India's 22 official languages. Happy reading!

FreeSBIE, the first-ever live CD based on FreeBSD, is a project that delivers a complete, desktop-oriented operating system that one can boot and use without installation, even on a computer which doesn't have a functional hard disk. The project made its first official release, version 1.0, in February 2004, which was followed by an updated version 1.1 some eight months later. The development of the promised 2.0 release took much longer than expected, with the final release finally appearing on the project's download mirrors in January 2007.

We asked Matteo Riondato, the FreeSBIE 2.0 release engineer, bugmaster and toolkit developer, a few questions about the origins of the project, new features in FreeSBIE 2.0, future plans and other topics of interest.

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DW: Matteo, thank you very much for taking your time to answer my questions. Let's start with the usual: please introduce yourself. How old are you? Where do you live? What do you do for living?

MR: I was born 21 years ago and have always lived in Padova, Italy since then. I'm attending the third year of the degree course in Information Engineering at the University of Padova, which is one of the oldest universities in the world and the best university in Italy according to a recent survey. I spend my free time in taking photos of my town, sailing and hanging out. Yes, FreeSBIE and other projects come after my life. As Kirk McKusick recently said: "Open source projects come after work, study, family and even spare time." :)

DW: You are a FreeBSD developer, correct? How did you become one and what attracted you to FreeBSD in the first place? What work do you do in FreeBSD?

MR: I began to use FreeBSD back when I was 16, because I was feeling tightened by Microsoft Windows and a friend of mine, which was at Berkeley back in "the golden age", suggested FreeBSD to me. I liked it immediately, especially the fact that everything is there, in what I considered the right place for it: are you looking for third party software? Look under /usr ports/. Are you searching the code of the whois(1) utility? Try /usr/src/usr.bin/whois and so on. A really good documentation and the support of other FreeBSD users gave me a really good impression of the operating system and its community too.

I became a FreeBSD developer exactly one years ago thanks to Philip Paeps. He accepted to be my mentor after I gave my contribution in closing some problem reports. Actually I had a freebsd.org account even before, since June 2005, thanks to Mark Linimon, because I needed it to work on PRs. As you may understand, although I've been lately quite busy with FreeSBIE, I mainly work in the "bugs busting" area. In my opinion feedback and bug reports we get from users are fundamental and we do have the duty to solve these bugs or add features users ask for.

DW: Do you use FreeBSD on your main desktop?

MR: Yes. I only have FreeBSD systems: my laptop and my desktop / development system are enough for me to work both on FreeSBIE and on FreeBSD. I do not miss anything for my desktop usage: I do not really need Flash, or accelerated graphics drivers, although I understand that they are useful for others and therefore I hope that hardware houses will support FreeBSD more and more.

DW: Please tell us about the beginnings of FreeSBIE. How did it all start?

MR: I am not the one who started the project. It was Dario Freni and Davide D'Amico who took an abandoned Brazilian idea for a live CD based on FreeBSD and brought it back to life again. I joined the project shortly after its start, mainly as a documentation writer and webmaster. As time passed, I became more involved in coding the scripts which form the toolkit we use to produce our ISO images. We released 1.0-RELEASE back in late 2003 and 1.1 in December 2004. In Summer 2005 Dario took part in the Google Summer of Code and he totally rewrote the toolkit because we really felt the lack of flexibility. It took to me another year to find the will and the time to develop the set of ISO images which brought the FreeSBIE 2.0-RELEASE.

DW: You recently released FreeSBIE 2.0. What are the main new features in the new version compared to the 1.x series?

MR: Well, it tells the world that the project is still alive, which is always good. :) It is based on FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE so it has all its great features. We worked quite a lot on giving the user the ability to tune some parameters such as localisation, window manager, memory file system disks' size and so on. We put a lot of efforts in the hardware auto-recognition and configuration, especially for sound and video cards. Despite that, a serious bug was introduced between 2.0-RC1 and 2.0-RELEASE: USB mice are not recognised correctly and appears to be frozen. To work around this issue, the user should execute the following command: sudo /etc/rc.d/devd start. We are really sorry for that and we plan to release a 2.0.1 ISO image which will have this and other bugs fixed.

For the future, I plan to merge FreeSBIE's, nanoBSD's and miniBSD's feature in one toolkit to be used to produce live FreeBSD system of different sizes: DVDs, CDs, USB pens, flash cards and so on. Afterwards, the toolkit will then be integrated in the FreeBSD base system and will hopefully be the "official" way to achieve this task. New features which I will probably add to FreeSBIE include a script to load the live CD totally in the RAM of the system.

The FreeSBIE 2.0 live CD is based on the recently released FreeBSD 6.2 (full image size: 1,173kB, screen resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)

DW: After trying FreeSBIE 2.0, I have to admit that I had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it's a nice and useful product that any BSD user will appreciate, but on the other, it lags behind the current live CD technologies that exist in the Linux world. As an example, the FreeSBIE file system on the CD is uncompressed which increases the time it takes for applications to load into memory. Also, unlike most Linux live CDs, FreeSBIE doesn't come with any overlay file system, such as Unionfs or Aufs. Did you think about including these technologies? If so, what are the difficulties of using them with FreeBSD?

MR: First of all, a correction: FreeSBIE file system on the CD is compressed: if it was not, it would not have been possible to put more than 1.3 GB of software on a single CD. We are using FreeBSD's geom_uzip(8) feature to compress and uncompress the entire /usr directory. About Unionfs: it has been broken in FreeBSD since 6-CURRENT (or shortly thereafter) and only lately there has been a work by Daichi Goto, Craig Rodrigues and others to fix it in 7-CURRENT. We had Unionfs in 1.1 but had to renounce it in 2.0. If and when it will be fixed in the -STABLE branch of FreeBSD, I will release a new FreeSBIE ISO image with Unionfs.

DW: Another feature I miss in FreeSBIE 2.0 is the hard disk installer. Any reason for leaving it out? If I remember correctly, FreeSBIE 1.1 did have a hard disk installer.

MR: FreeSBIE 1.1 had BSDInstaller thanks to the work of Scott Ullrich, BSDInstaller and PFSense developer. As I said before, FreeSBIE went under a total rewrite in 2005, after 1.1 had been released and, while developing 2.0, I had not enough time to port BSDInstaller again. An external developer, Markus Bolter, tried to work on this task but he was stopped by some bugs so we decided to ship FreeSBIE 2.0 without any hard disk installer. I would not say it is a missing feature: I think FreeSBIE as FreeBSD on a CD-ROM and that is what FreeSBIE really is as it has no patches or whatever: it is FreeBSD, with some rc.d scripts to make it work from the CD, a nice graphical interface and many packages installed. If someone wants FreeSBIE on hard disk, I would suggest them to install FreeBSD and then copy FreeSBIE configuration files on his system.

DW: Have you tried some of the other FreeBSD live CDs that exist on the market, such as Frenzy, RoFreeSBIE or TrueBSD? If so what do you think of these efforts? Are you cooperating with the developers of these projects?

MR: I tried some of them some time ago. I appreciate that others are working in a way which is different from ours. I just wonder why they chose to develop separate projects instead of offering their help to FreeSBIE, which is the first (in the sense of time) widespread FreeBSD live CD. I think there is some kind of duplication of work going on and this not always good for open source projects.

DW: Besides coding for FreeBSD and creating FreeSBIE, you are also involved in GUFI (Gruppo Utenti FreeBSD Italia), an Italian FreeBSD user group. Can you describe some of your activities in GUFI? What do you do to promote the use of FreeBSD in Italy?

MR: I am a member of the Board of Directors of the GUFI, yes. We are a small group but we try to work hard to promote FreeBSD in our country. Some of us helped in the organisation of the last EuroBSDCon, held in November in Milan, we write articles for the main Italian *NIX magazine, we give support to the Italian FreeBSD community by offering help through our mailing lists, and so on. Thanks to FreeSBIE, to EuroBSDCon 2006 and to our participation in other recent BSD conferences, the Italian contribution to FreeBSD has been more clearly recognised and, I dare to say, appreciated.

DW: Imagine for a moment that you are in charge of the FreeBSD project. What would you change and why? Is there any area that you believe should be getting more attention? Do you think more effort should be made to push FreeBSD into the desktop space?

MR: Uhm. I really like the way the project is run: it is a mix of democracy and meritocracy which really works well in this case. The FreeBSD project is not only about writing sources for an operating system. It also focuses on writing documentation, giving support to users, providing third party applications, and so on. I think this completeness is much more clear now in comparison to some time ago. This is important, because our being complete is a real wealth for the project itself.

DW: Matteo, thank you very much for your time and all the best with your projects!

MR: Thank you for your questions. I read DistroWatch every day, so keep up the good work!

Let's start this week's news section with an update from Paris. In a formal press release (which has yet to appear on the company's web site) Mandriva has announced that its distribution will return to a 6-month release cycle: "Customers and partners can sometimes make a difference. In accordance with their feedback and Mandriva's analysis of the overall advantages and drawbacks of the longer development schedule, Mandriva decided to adjust the life cycle of the consumer oriented products to a shorter 6 month period." Mandriva's next stable release, version 2007.1, is expected in early April 2007.

In other interesting news, it looks like Mandriva is about to release two new live editions of its latest stable product: a gaming DVD and a live CD with a 3D desktop window manager called Metisse (see screenshot below). Metisse is a project that has been around for over a year with the goal of developing a toolkit that enables the creation of new types of desktop environments. Mandriva is the first distribution to use Metisse for its 3D desktop, although a quick search on Google reveals that some Fedora developers have also been experimenting with the new window manager. The two new Mandriva live editions have already been released to early seeders, so it shouldn't be long before they become available to all members of the Mandriva Club. Stay tuned for further news about this innovative development.

The developers of PCLinuxOS, one of the most beautiful and user-friendly distributions available today, have finally released the first experimental build of a brand new version - 2007. PCLinuxOS 2007 is a complete rebuild, with most of its base system and all main applications upgraded to their latest versions. As such, it is no longer possible to upgrade from the 0.9x series and all existing PCLinuxOS users are encouraged to perform a clean installation. This is one distribution worth watching over the next few months as it has the potential to entice many computer users to the world of Linux. The PCLinuxOS page on DistroWatch received over 8,000 page hits within 24 hours after the announcement (that's despite the fact that the release was announced on a Sunday). As usual, the new release is tagged as a "beta" and meant for those users who intend to provide bug reports to the development team. As for the rest of us, this Tuxmachines review should give us enough reasons to try out for the final release when it's out - possibly before the end of January.

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Cutting Free has published an interview with the two gNewSense founders, Paul O’Malley and Brian Brazil. How did the idea of creating an Ubuntu-based distribution for Free Software purists come about? "In November 2005 Richard Stallman and Mark Shuttleworth were in Tunis. They both spoke of 'gnubuntu', however both meant something that the other could not mean. As an Ubuntu member, I thought, hang on a sec, that is a great idea. I nearly dropped the idea but one particular person in Texas kept prodding me. I asked Brian for help, he kindly agreed and so began an adventure. As the idea developed, it became obvious to us that to make the distro 'FSF Acceptable' several steps had to be taken. Not pointing at none Free Software, not using non free tools and, very important on the list, we needed a punny name." Read the rest of the interview here.

On a related note, the first live CD images of the new gNewSense 1.1 started propagating to the project's download mirrors earlier today (Monday). Unlike the previous version, gNewSense 1.1 comes in two live CD editions containing either the GNOME (version 2.14.1) or KDE (version 3.5.2) desktops. Although not yet announced at the time of writing, the new release continues to be based on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS with kernel 2.6.15, but it does include a new CD boot procedure (now booting straight into GNOME/KDE, rather than a login manager) and its artwork has also been updated. Interestingly, the GNOME edition of gNewSense 1.1 comes with the popular Firefox web browser renamed to "BurningDog".

The Fedora Unity project has released a new set of Fedora Core 6 CD and DVD images, complete with all official security, version and bug-fix updates since the distribution's initial release: "The Fedora Unity Project is proud to announce the release of new ISO Re-Spins of Fedora Core 6. These Re-Spin ISOs are based on Fedora Core 6 and all updates released as of January 11th, 2007. The ISO images are available for i386 and x86_64 architectures via BitTorrent starting Thursday, January 18th, 2007. PPC images will follow within the next 5 days, but will have had only limited testing." Fedora Unity releases are excellent alternatives for those users who wish to perform a new Fedora installation and immediately have an up-to-date Fedora system without having to download hundreds of updates separately. For more details please read the full release announcement. The Fedora Unity CD and DVD images are available for download via BitTorrent.

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Do you use or consider using Gentoo Linux as a server distribution? If so, you might be interested in reading this user's experiences before making a decision about deploying Gentoo in your server room: "Gentoo is fun to play with, but oh is it time consuming! I guess that's the cost of living with a hardcore compile everything attitude - you'll be on the bleeding edge and you better make sure you can balance on such a thin edge. For a desktop system, Gentoo seems fabulous. Fun to work with, colorful, a beautiful ports like system for software. USE flags. But for a server, especially a production server, Gentoo just isn't time effective." It's not all bad news, however; the author also mentions the many positives of Gentoo Linux before concluding that the popular source-based distribution is probably more suitable for use on a developer's workstation than in a production server environment.

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The fans and users of rescue live CDs have a new option to consider when embarking on another data recovery mission: T-Resc(ue), developed by the T2 SDE project. The most interesting part of T-Resc(ue) is that it is based on the light-weight uClibc (rather than glibc) and uses a minimal, Kdrive-powered X window system with the Blackbox window manager. Other interesting features: "It includes Nvi, Zile (symlinked to vi and Emacs), partitioning stuff, FUSE: ntfs-3g and zfs-fuse, is Squashfs compressed and Unionfs write overlayed and features minit and dietlibc for the early userspace." The latest release, version 0.5, is considered an alpha-quality technology preview and is available from the project's home page. Download from here: t-resc-0.5-x86-pentium.iso (49.4MB, MD5).

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India is often pictured as one of the most promising countries in terms of adopting open source software technologies in the coming years. As if to prove the point, a new project appeared on the Indian Linux scene late last year. Called BOSS GNU/Linux, this Debian-based distribution is developed by India's National Resource Centre for Free/Open Source Software (NRCFOSS) and provides support for six main Indian languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi, Telugu and Tamil. Besides localisation work, the BOSS developers are also integrating many modern Linux technologies, such as graphical installer, 3D desktop, hardware auto-configuration, live CD capability and other features, into their distribution. The project's goal is best summarised by its own mission statement: "Our ultimate goal is to localise it into all 22 official Indian languages so that Information Technology can reach even the non-English speaking masses who are denied its benefits today." To download BOSS GNU/Linux 1.0 installation and live CDs please visit this page.

It seems that Sun Microsystem's Solaris has entered a period of increased drive to generate greater public awareness of the popular UNIX operating system and its features. Last week we saw numerous reports about the likelihood that OpenSolaris would soon be released under a dual-license, one of which would be the General Public Licence (GPL). One obvious benefit of this move would be new-found compatibility between the licensing of Linux and Solaris technologies, which would surely lead to porting the most interesting bits of Solaris to Linux and other open source operating system. It would also resolve the long-standing grey area of adding GPL-based utilities and software to Solaris, as Nexenta has been doing for a while. And why should we care about porting Solaris code to Linux? Because many of its technologies, such as the excellent ZFS file system, are just too exciting to remain forever burdened by a restrictive license. Once again, we are seeing the best in software freedom where ideas and code are shared instead of kept under a proprietary hood.

Matteo Riondato has announced the release of FreeSBIE 2.0, a major new version of the popular FreeBSD-based live CD based: "FreeSBIE 2.0-RELEASE available! FreeSBIE 2.0-RELEASE (codename Clint Eastwood) is based on the fresh FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE, both in terms of sources and packages." FreeSBIE is one of the growing numbers of FreeBSD-based live CDs, booting into the Xfce or Fluxbox desktop and sporting a number of popular applications, such as Firefox 1.5.0.8. The latest version also adds the ability to backup and restore data on a hard disk and provides privacy enhancing features with Tor and Privoxy. Please read the release announcement and release notes for further information.

ZenLive, the live CD edition of Zenwalk Linux, has reached version 4.2: "ZenLive 4.2 is based on Zenwalk Linux version 4.2 and compliments the speed and stability you've come to expect from Zenwalk. Some of the new features include Zenpanel which is Zenwalk's new system configuration panel that makes customizing your Linux system easy. Desktop enhancements include a new panel layout and RSS feed reader that were added to Xfce among other nice enhancements, such as the original Tango-derived icon theme. Howl has been replaced with the more modern and supported Avahi Zeroconf subsystem. Fam has been replaced with Gamin resulting in noticeable speed increases to file and directory monitoring." Find more details in the release announcement.

The Kurumin project has announced the release of Kurumin Light 7.0, a mini-CD edition of the Brazilian distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux. Kurumin Light comes on only 182 MB, but includes the full KDE desktop with Konqueror and Kaffeine, the Kurumin-specific magic icons and all the custom scripts. Compared to the standard edition, it lacks some of the larger applications, such as OpenOffice.org and Java, and it also comes without support for scanners and 3D acceleration. Kurumin Light can be used as a live CD, but a hard disk installation script is also available for those who wish to give it a permanent space on their hard disk. More information about Kurumin Light can be found on the project's web site (in Portuguese).

Gilles Espinasse has announced the release of a new version of IPCop Firewall: "This release updates a few tools due to security issues, fixes bugs and updates some drivers. You are encouraged to update from previous releases as soon as you can. IPCop v1.4.13 is released unchanged from 1.4.13rc1. As usual, this version can be installed as an update from previous v1.4.x versions or with a ready-to-go ISO or USB bootable images for a fresh install. Update is split in two parts due to space limits on small configurations. Install the two updates and reboot mandatory. Kernel 2.4.34 is provided. This kernel update may cause trouble with unofficial add-ons not compiled for this kernel." Read the full release announcement for more details.

Bruce Smith has announced the release of Devil-Linux 1.2.12, a new version of the project's live CD firewall and server distribution: "Devil-Linux 1.2.12 is available for download. Change highlights: Kernel 2.4.34, security fixes, many package updates, new Perl modules, a few new packages, and more." Among the many package updates, Postfix has been upgraded to version 2.3.6, OpenSSH to 4.5p1, MySQL to 4.1.22, Shorewall to 3.2.7, BIND to 9.3.3 and DHCP to 3.0.5, while a missing LDAP support has been added to the Squid proxy server. Please read the release announcement and changelog for further information.

Yuichiro Nakada has announced a new release of Berry Linux, version 0.78, a Fedora-based live CD with support for 3D desktop with AIGLX and Beryl. The new release uses the Linux kernel 2.6.19.2, compiled with symmetric multi-processing support, udev/ndev and boot splash. The live CD employs the latest Squashfs (version 3.2) and FUSE (version 2.6.1) file systems with full NTFS read and write support via the ntfs-3g driver. On the desktop, Berry Linux 0.78 comes with KDE 3.5.5, OpenOffice.org 2.1.0 and Firefox 1.5.0.9. Among the changes in this release, Beryl has been updated to version 0.1.4, WINE to 0.9.27 and xine-lib to 1.1.3, while Vim 7.0 is a new addition to the live CD. Xgl and DirectFB have been removed from the distribution. Please read the full changelog for further information.

Tom Kerremans has announced the release of Trinity Rescue Kit 3.2, a Mandriva-based distribution designed for system rescue, repair, password recovery and related tasks: "Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK) 3.2 is officially released. The new and improved features: ntfs-3g - full read and write NTFS support; virus scan can make use of 4 different engines: ClamAV, F-prot, Grisoft AVG and BitDefender; also cleaning has been greatly improved; boot from USB disk as well as from network over PXE; integrated file server: access your local files on a TRK booted computer via Windows Explorer; easily reset Windows passwords; clone NTFS file systems over the network...." Read the release announcement and visit the project's home page for more information.

It's always disappointing when we have to report about a distribution or project that has attempted to influence the DistroWatch page hit ranking figures in an unfair manner. Last week it was the turn of Mandriva Linux to do just that. On Monday, 15 January, a webmaster responsible for start.mandriva.com added an invisible iframe to the bottom of that page which loaded the Mandriva Linux page on DistroWatch, resulting in over 17,000 illegal "page hits" on our Mandriva page. Normally, this page receives around 800 - 1,000 page hits per day, so such a massive increase of page hits immediately alerted us to the possibility of unfair play.

It's worth pointing out that this kind of page loading is the most damaging and malicious of them all. Not only it brought zero number of new visitors to DistroWatch, it caused a substantial load increase to both the DistroWatch web server and to those readers who visited the Mandriva web site.

After commenting on the issue in the last week's DistroWatch Weekly forum, the only reaction we received was a comment by a person signed in as "romain" and apparently representing Mandriva Corporation. This is what he had to say on the subject: "If this may stop any rumour of supposed evilness from the corporate (or Mandriva) side, the iframe code was added yesterday by an intern that obviously thought it was worth it to fool the ranking that way and that it mattered. I'm not sure that was the best idea. I cannot pass all my interns through an ethics filter before putting them to work. No need to say this guy got some bashing here. We're still keeping him, there's some work for him left, in a less critical environment."

The malicious iframe code was removed from start.mandriva.com shortly after I posted the comment in last week's DistroWatch Weekly forum. Subsequently the Mandriva page hit count for January 15th was reset to 0 as a punishment for the cheating attempt.

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DistroWatch in Hindi

Many thanks to Mohd Omar from the BOSS GNU/Linux project who helped translating the DistroWatch menus and common phrases that appear in distribution tables into Hindi. Hindi now joins Bengali as the second Indian language DistroWatch has been translated into. If any readers with the knowledge of other Indian languages are willing to help translating the roughly 200 phrases into their language, please contact us (see the bottom of this page for contact details). Your help would be much appreciated!

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New distributions added to database

BOSS GNU/Linux. BOSS (Bharat Operating System Solutions) GNU/Linux is a Debian-based distribution developed by C-DAC with the goal of enhancing the use of free and open source software in India. Made specifically for the Indian environment, it consists of a pleasing desktop environment coupled with Indian language support and other packages that are most relevant for use in the government domain.

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New distributions added to waiting list

Hardened Linux. Hardened Linux is a minimalist hardened distribution based on Slackware Linux. It is optimised to run as firewall system, VPN gateway, IDS system, and authentication system. Currently not all of these features are fully implemented.

ValEnt Linux. ValEnt Linux is a complete home and office operating system that is easy to use and install, it can be run directly from the CD or installed to a hard drive. ValEnt Linux includes application for writing documents, spreadsheets, database, image manipulation (GIMP), audio and video (MP3, DVD, DivX and more), FTP clients, email clients, Internet browsers, CD burning utilities and much more. ValEnt Linux is based on PCLinuxOS.